Julian Bishop has had a lifelong interest in ecology thanks largely to a childhood in rural Wiltshire. He’s a former television journalist and apart from poetry has a passion for gardens, running and dogs although not necessarily in that order. He’s been widely published and was a runner up in the International Ginkgo Prize For Eco-Poetry. He lives with his family in North London. His website is here.
The poems in this first collection were written over seven or so years at a time when daily headlines brought more evidence of climate change and our increasing disconnection with nature. Bishop, a journalist who once worked as an environment reporter, talks in the preface about how he feels he failed in raising awareness about the seriousness of the crisis by reporting on the alarming data and hopes the more emotional engagement offered by a poem might have more impact. His approach is often formal, there are villanelles, sonnets and a lipogram among other forms. The book itself is divided into three sections which look at the impact of climate change on the natural world, a second more political and satirical section followed by a third more forward-looking section which offers some more hopeful poems.
From We Saw It All Happen
Polished mahogany tables heaved
under the weight of Regency treats -
calves’ foot jellies, sweetmeats,
wobbling flummery poised on concealed
from Norwegian fjords. Numb-thumbed
cutters, slicing through rime, fashioned
brieze-blocks of ice to fit
to stave off melt, cargoes stowed
between beams of deal below,
cubes cracked big enough
Staring now into the brick-lined
void unearthed in grounds behind
a stuccoed row, it hits you
with the convivial aristocratic clack
of a vintage hock or an Escubac
on the rocks, how tickling a gentleman's
than the cost of a frosted bourbon,
those who only ever reflect on
melting ice when it is raised in a tumbler.
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